How to find orphan pages
-
Hi all,
I've been checking these forums for an answer on how to find orphaned pages on my site and I can see a lot of people are saying that I should cross check the my XML sitemap against a Screaming Frog crawl of my site.
However, the sitemap is created using Screaming Frog in the first place... (I'm sure this is the case for a lot of people too).
Are there any other ways to get a full list of orphaned pages? I assume it would be a developer request but where can I ask them to look / extract?
Thanks!
-
Yes I mentioned in my case I use Semrush and there is a dedicated space for that specific parameter. The easiest way to get your log files is logging into your cPanel and find an option called Raw Log Files. If you are still not able to find it, you may need to contact your hosting provider and ask them to provide the log files for your site.
Raw Access Logs allow you to see what the visits to your website were without displaying graphs, charts, or other graphics. You can use the Raw Access Logs menu to download a zipped version of the server’s access log for your site. This can be very useful when you want to quickly see who has visited your site.
Raw logs may only contain a few hours’ worths of data because they are discarded after the system processes them. However, if archiving is enabled, the system archives the raw log data before the system discards it. So go ahead and ensure that you are archiving!
Once you have your log file ready to go, you now need to gather the other data set of pages that can be crawled by Google, using Screaming Frog.
Crawl Your Pages with Screaming Frog SEO Spider
Using the Screaming Frog SEO Spider, you can crawl your website as Googlebot would, and export a list of all the URLs that were found.
Once you have Screaming Frog ready, first ensure that your crawl Mode is set to the default ‘Spider’.
Then make sure that under Configuration > Spider, ‘Check External Links’ is unchecked, to avoid unnecessary external site crawling.
Now you can type in your website URL, and click Start.
Once the crawl is complete, simply
a. Navigate to the Internal tab.
b. Filter by HTML.
c. Click Export.
d. Save in .csv format.Now you should have two sets of URL data, both in .csv format:
All you need to do now is compare the URL data from the two .csv files, and find the URLs that were not crawlable.If you decided to analyze a log file instead, you can use the Screaming Frog SEO Log File Analyser to uncover our orphan pages. (Keep in mind that Log File Analyzer is not the same tool that SEO spyder)
The tool is very easy to use (download here), from the dashboard you have the ability to import the two data sets that you need to analyze
If the answer were useful do not forget to mark it as a good answer ....Good Luck
-
Hi Roman,
Out of interest, is there an option to expert an orphan page report like there is in Screaming Frog? (Reports / Orphan Pages).
I guess the true and most realistic option is to get the list from the dev team as using the sitemap isn't plausible as these pages should still get indexed. The new Google Search Console also lets you test individual pages and as long as they're in the sitemap, they should (hopefully) be indexed.
Still, trying to get a list of ALL pages on a site, without dev support, seems to be a challenge I'm trying to solve
-
Even Screaming-frog have problems to find all the orphan-pages, I use Screaming-frog, Moz, Semrush, Ahrefs, and Raven-tools in my day to day and honestly, Semrush is the one that gives me better results for that specific tasks. As an experience, I can say that a few months ago I took a website and it was a complete disaster, no sitemap, no canonical tags, no meta-tags and etc.
I run screaming-frog and showed me just 200 pages but I knew it was too much more at the end I founded 5k pages with Semrush, probably even the crawler of screaming frog has problems with that website so I commenting that as an experience.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
WP image pages
I used Dreamweaver for years but have recently been switching to Wordpress. On the whole the results have been very positive. However, I don't like the way that WP generates a page for images when the image is inserted into a blog post. I was just reading this http://www.eyeflow.com/content-strength-audit/ excellent article on Content Strength Audit and it referred to this problem as well. Often, when I insert an image into a blog, I delete the reference to the image page and link directly to the image. Is this an effective way to deal with the is problem? Is there a better approach? Best,
Technical SEO | | ChristopherGlaeser
Christopher0 -
Why are my Duplicated Pages not being updated?
I've recently changed a bunch of duplicated pages from our site. I did get a slightly minimized amount of duplicated pages, however, some of the pages that I've already fixed are still unfixed according to MOZ. Whenever I check the back-end of each of these pages, I see that they've already been changed and non of them are the same in terms of Meta Tag Title is concern. Can anyone provide any suggestions on what I should do to get a more accurate result? Is there a process that I'm missing?
Technical SEO | | ckroaster0 -
Do I need to 301 EVERY page?
I have a client who is consolidating multiple EMD domains into a single domain for SEO reasons and for practical reason, like not having to produce content and perform SEO for 20 domains. My question is this: Do I need to 301 every single page from these old EMD domains? I bill this client hourly and while I could take the time to write 301s for literally thousands of pages I feel that this might not be the best use of his money, that I could strategically 301 the landing pages that get traffic and then route everything else to the new root domain...thoughts? I've researched this and have not been able to hear a really strong opinion yet.
Technical SEO | | BrianJGomez0 -
URL Structure for "Find A Professional" Page
I've read all the URL structure posts out there, but I'm really undecided and would love a second opinion. Currently, this is how the developer has our professionals directory working: 1. You search by inputting your Zip Code and selecting a category (such as Pool Companies) and we return all professionals within a X-mile radius of that ZIP. This is how the URL's are structured... 1. Main Page: /our-professionals 2. The URL looks like this after a search for "Deck Builders" in ZIP 19033: /our-professionals?zipcode=19033&HidSuppliers=&HiddenSpaces=&HidServices=&HidServices_all=[16]%2C&HidMetroareas=&srchbox= 3. When I click one of the businesses, URL looks like this: viewprofile.php?id=409 I know how to go about doing this, but I'm undecided on the best structure for the URL's. Maybe for results pages do this: find-professionals/deck-builders/philadelphia-pa-19033 And for individual pro's profiles do this: /deck-builders/philadelphia-pa-19033/Billys-Deck-Service Any input on how to best structure this so that we can have a good chance of showing in SERPs for "Deck Builders near New Jersey" and the such, would be much appreciated.
Technical SEO | | zDucketz0 -
Duplicate page content
hi I am getting an duplicate content error in SEOMoz on one of my websites it shows http://www.exampledomain.co.uk http://www.exampledomain.co.uk/ http://www.exampledomain.co.uk/index.html how can i fix this? thanks darren
Technical SEO | | Bristolweb0 -
Penalized by google. How to find out?
Our webpage performs very bad on some keywords relating to one product. At the SeoMoz-ranking page i can se we are number 9 but we have the highest (higher than our competitors) rating in almost every category (at least 25 of 30) on the keyword difficulty report. How do i find out why this is so, or if we have been penalized by google?On other search-engines (yahoo, bing etc) we are number one! And we have the highest pagerank among the competitors...
Technical SEO | | alsvik0 -
Page Over-optimized?
I read over this post on the blog tonight: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/lessons-learned-by-an-over-optimizer-14730 & it's got me concerned that I might be having a similar issue on our site? Back in March & April of last year, we ranked fairly well for a number of long tail keywords, here is one in particular 'Mio Drink' for this page: http://www.discountqueens.com/free-mio-drink-from-kraft-facebook-offer The page is still indexed, but appears back on page #3 for the search term. During this time we had made a number of different updates to our site & I can't seem to put an exact finger on what might have caused the problem? Can anyone see any issues that might have caused this to drop? Thanks, BJ
Technical SEO | | seointern0 -
Ranking above PLACE PAGES
What does it take for results to show up above Place Page results. It seems like Google Local gets a lot of emphasis . Any thoughts?
Technical SEO | | musillawfirm0